India Third to Appeal ISO's OOXML Approval

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "India is now the third country to appeal the ISO's approval of OOXML, with their appeal arriving just before the deadline last night. According to PC World, this makes OOXML the first BRM process under ISO/JTC 1 to be appealed, which leaves us in uncharted territory. Although there was substantial confusion in the comments on yesterday's story, Brazil is really appealing, not merely disapproving, of OOXML, having sent a letter that begins with 'The Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result.' Groklaw speculates that this may have something to do with Microsoft hedging their bets by supporting ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, though we probably won't see any more countries appeal now that the deadline has passed."

Fourth country on the way

Andy Updegrove says a fourth country may also have appealed [consortiuminfo.org].

Re:Fourth country on the way

Given that technology experts in most every country where extremely vocally opposed to OOXML to begin with, I'm shocked that ONLY three or four have filed appeals.

Re:Fourth country on the way

TFA was somewhat vague on how many total appeals there were. It sounded like just 3, then a bit later, they indicated that they wouldn't announce the total list until later.

I was pretty sure that Norway in particular was going due to the abusive manner the discussions were held.

Re:Fourth country on the way

Given that technology experts in most every country where extremely vocally opposed to OOXML to begin with, I'm shocked that ONLY three or four have filed appeals.

Most of the commitees that were stacked by Microsoft to approve it remain stacked when it comes to appealing.

Re:Fourth country on the way

How many are required to make it official?

I think the appeal has to be modded +4 insightful or +5 interesting otherwise Microsoft will just mod it +5 funny and the mod points go down the gurgler.

Fast Track

If the approval was fast tracked, then the appeal should be too. Get that spec disqualified, FAST.

Re:

No, I've a much better idea. Place the specification on a genuine fast track - say, the Monte Carlo F1 circuit - and let it be utterly crushed into oblivion before being smeared across the landscape.

Re:

IVe EXCELENT karma

My dogma is to browse at -1. Karma don't kount!

Re:Yawn... Is This Important?

Uh, actually, I'm sure they're thinking plenty hard about playing nice, and seeing as there is a competitor (OO is taking away some of their customers, even if only the ones who don't care about spread sheets going beyond 256 columns, and since it keeps getting markedly better where Office keeps getting markedly more irritating...) have decided that is a risk they simply cannot afford to take.

You must have been asleep for the past 2 decades, because otherwise you'd know by now that Microsoft's version of "playing nice" is creating a de facto standard that they alone control then avoiding making any changes 9even positive ones) to it so long as nobody else is in the game.

MS losing business to OOo?

Microsoft sells student copies of MS Office dirt cheap. I've seen a few schools install OOo side-by-side with MS Office, and some invididual users make the switch, but until major companies cancel mass volume licensing of MS Office, I don't see MS breaking a sweat.

The fact that several large governments were talking about ditching MS Office (over open file standards) is what got MS to play ball. Now that they support ODF (and likely OOXML once they iron that out as well a bit) those government agencies are likely to stay with MS Office.

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

"until major companies cancel mass volume licensing of MS Office"

Which will happen when *drumroll* enough individual users make the switch. I didn't say that OO was beating MS Office or even universally better than it (although for my needs it actually is, which is why I have declined to install MS Office even when offered it for free-as-in-beer), just that it is becoming a credible threat for the relatively near future.

The bottom line is that Firefox has demonstrated to Microsoft that FOSS can come out of nowhere to beat the crap out of their products, and now that one of their golden geese is being threatened they aren't about to take any chances. If they lose their Office monopoly, that's easily as bad to them as losing the Windows monopoly, not least because it directly threatens that one as well (why would corporate users want to pay money for Windows to run software that runs better and safer on any number of cheaper solutions?). It seems like they are realizing that they let OO continue and grow for far too long already, and they're actually concerned they might have to compete again, and on much worse terms with a far inferior track record than the last time around.

Re:

Now that they support ODF

A minor nitpick. MS have stated their intention to support ODF. Until they deliver it's dangerous to assume or to state as fact, that support. Alex.

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

A minor nitpick. MS have stated their intention to support ODF. Until they deliver it's dangerous to assume or to state as fact, that support. Alex.

More to the point, Microsoft are famously good at corrupting standards. I wouldn't be too surprised to see ODF "support" that amounts to "will happily read and render sensibly anything produced by OO.o, will go out of its way to write ODF files that for whatever reason OO.o doesn't like".

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

Having worked for a few different Fortune 500 companies, OSS is often a dirty word. Executives only trust big names they know.

We only buy Microsoft and Dell for most things. We just bought an expensive Sharepoint Server, when a simple wiki would have saved tons of money. We use Linux, Unix and Solaris only in implementations largely dictated to us by vendors.

I think it makes sense to save money by going to OpenOffice, but corporate America doesn't always make sense.

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

corporate America doesn't always make sense.

Which is why they'll be overtaken by hungrier organisations that do make sense.

Re:MS losing business to OOo?

"OSS is often a dirty word."

Then stop using "Open Source" and start using "Free Software" and do not mention that "Free" means "Free as speech" and not "Free as beer", when ever you talk with persons who are money-slaves. Let them think that they get software for free and they dont need to pay for it. Then let the lawyers to take care of GPL and other people to understand they are actually using OSS.

Bosses and other persons who makes the decisions, dont need to know those, because they are so afraid that "Open Source" force them to publish their treasure. They are like pirates, you need to trick them. They are greedy, you need to give them to think they have control for everything.

They will learn actually...

Not about OOo

This isn't about OOo versus MS Office. I don't mind paying for software. I just want to make sure that when I save a file, people can open it and read it, especially me a few years down the road. Microsoft's closed, proprietary formats keep changing (fo

Re:Yawn... Is This Important?

who modded this insightful?

this isn't about openoffice.org, this is about people having access to their own information. This is about governments being able to read all the documents they are making now in the future. This is about unfettered, exact communication between countries.

in short, this is remarkably important. I can't think of anything more important in communication than open standards.

Re:

The Open Office/Star Office file format was the basis for ODF but it received fairly extensive reworking in the process of creating ODF.

Re:

Well run corporations don't do that. But corporations the size of Google or MS or IBM have a lot of money at their disposal, I don't believe that any of those 3 couldn't shit an obscene amount of money and still be in business.

Sure, it's a poor way of doin

Re:They won't count.

Second and third world countries that represent a huge market.

Brazil for example, is in the top 10 countries by both Internet Users and Time Spent Online, usually in the 2 top spots in the latter. Ok, most of this time is spent by teenagers in useless thing like Orkut and MSN, but whatever.

The important thing in this is: information can and WILL spread like a wildfire. And be sure that many people will embrace it.

If these "not-real" countries continue their "line of thinking", in the near future we could have more than 1 billion people that reject anything that comes from MS.

It wouldn't be wise to ignore THAT.

Re:They won't count.

The math, the math, India is the No.2 most populous country and Brazil is No.5, with India expected to be No.1 within 15 years, because of China's population control measures. The opinion of a significant market of PC and smart phone users, probably does matter to MS.

Re:They won't count.

You will probably find that in the end that no weight is given to these appeals because they all come from second and third world countries.

Yet the new technological meccas Azerbaijan and C'ote D'ivoire gets taken seriously when voting in favor of OOXML?

Something sure smells fishy.

Re:Three countries wasting taxpayers' money

I wonder how the citizens feel about their money being wasted on these appeals to satisfy the hatred of Microsoft by a few loudmouthed geek fanboys?

It couldn't possibly be because the proposed standard was too complex and too defective to be fast tracked in the 1st place? Consider that over 80% of the problems with the specification had soloutions proposed by ECMA but "due to lack of time" not reviewed or discussed. The committee should have been able to review and if needed revise those "solutions". The fact that one private body was given unsupervised control of "fixes" when it was supposed to be the committee composed of National representatives that had the actual say to me is a good enough reason to appeal.

All that of course ignores the ongoing scandals and accusations that the system was twisted by Microsofts wealth and power rather than following the rules.

An excerpt from South Africas appeal giving the core of their reasons.

This appeal is made in accordance with Clause 11.1.2: "A P member of JTC 1 or an SC may appeal against any action, or inaction, on the part of JTC 1 or an SC when the P member considers that in such action or inaction:

* questions of principle are involved;

* the contents of a draft may be detrimental to the reputation of IEC or ISO; or

* the point giving rise to objection was not known to JTC 1 or SC during earlier discussions."

We believe that there is an important question of principle involved and that the reputation of ISO/IEC is indeed at stake. There has been speculation about the need to revise the directives around fast track processing. While such revision might indeed be necessary, we cannot accept the outcome of a process which the existing directives have not, in our opinion, been applied.

It appears that they are appealing not to satisfy peoples hatred of Microsoft but because the rules state that appeals should be launched for one of 3 reasons all of which South Africa feels apply.

Re:Appeal after the standard was passed?

Yes, but if a country suspects that there have been irregularities they can call schenanigans.

Imagine this: The country of Lithuanistan is a voting member of ISO. United Megacorp has a smaller standards body like ECMA put a standard they cooked up on the ISO fast-track process. Everything proceeds as expected and the Lithuanistanian national body votes YES on the standard, even though most Lithuanistanian techies are very sceptical about it. A week after the vote, though, someone from UniMeg leaks documents that show that the entire Lithuanistanian NB had been bought off by UniMeg and they didn't vote because the standard hat merit but because they liked their new cars.

Lithuanistan is pissed. They want a chance to stop the standardization process (or at least freeze it for further investigation), now that they can prove it has been tampered with. However, all votes have already been cast. This appeals process is what they'd use: If you have doubt that the standardization process went as it should you can appeal before the standard becomes final.